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Conference Reports
The brief final panel, ‘History, Progress and Heritage-Making’,
chaired by Astrid Swenson (Cambridge) included two papers.
Colette Appelian (Berkeley City) focused on how the advent of mod -
ern ity in the form of motor cars in Fez, in French Morocco, changed
the whole experience of monumental landscapes. Maximilian
Hartmuth (Sabanci/Istanbul) conceptualized the proto-colonial cultural
practices of shaping history and heritage in the Balkans, which
was not a colonized region in the traditional sense of the term.
The concluding session was opened by two commentaries on the
proceedings of the conference by Daniel Sherman and John
MacKenzie respectively. Daniel Sherman referred to the themes of
curating and the significance of the visual archive and ‘moving’
images, as well as imaginary histories marked by landscape that a
number of papers addressed to draw attention to the movement and
malleability of objects and monuments that are characteristic of the
process of heritage-making, especially in colonial and postcolonial
contexts. Preservation laws, in his view, represented a mere formalization
of this process. John Mackenzie reiterated the notion of heritage-making
as a dynamic, ever-changing process and argued that
hegemony is an inadequate explanatory framework for understanding
the construction of heritage in colonial contexts. He dwelt on the
rise of a large, wealthy bourgeoisie, which was replicated in the
empire, and the growth of a bourgeois public sphere as central to the
development of ideas of heritage-making. The concluding discussion
developed around questions such as the participation and role of
missionaries, Christianization and women in the colonies, public
sphere and aristocratic involvement in the colonies, modernity and
heritage, including the question of pre-modern legacies in heritagemaking,
heritage and ideas of the nation-state. The discussion raised
the question of the ethics of heritage-making and stressed the need in
any historical treatment of the subject to find a balance between, on
the one hand, socio-historical approaches and, on the other, the
emphasis placed by postcolonial studies on power structures. It was
agreed that a great degree of self-reflexivity was called for among
historians trying to analyse how communities and groups in colonial
systems fashioned and understood their pasts.
A conference volume is planned.
INDRA SENGUPTA (GHIL)
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